NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE | VOL 4 | JUNE 2014 | www.nature.com/natureclimatechange 409
opinion & comment
future generations to meet their own
needs
12
. Resilient systems share qualities of
sustainable systems because they are able to
minimize the negative impacts of adverse
events on societies and sustain or even
improve their functionality by adapting to
and learning from fundamental changes
caused by those events.
In summary, risk analysis and risk
management based on probabilistic
quantitative methods have been widely
adopted and have been useful for dealing
with foreseeable and calculable stress
situations. Benchmarks and thresholds for
risk analysis are built into the regulations
and policies of organizations and nations;
however, this approach is no longer
suicient to address the evolving nature of
risks in the modern world. Moreover, the
increased complexity and interdependency
of many of society’s critical networks
presents a fundamental challenge to even
the most comprehensive and sophisticated
risk analysis. herefore, early integration
of resilience into the design of systems
and the regulatory structures of systems
management is needed to address the
emerging issues associated with complexity
and uncertainty. An urgent need exists to
complement the existing knowledge-base
of risk analysis and management by further
developing frameworks and models enabling
system-wide and network-wide resilience
analysis, engineering and management.
Although research and development
on methods and tools is progressing,
establishing channels of communication
for transparent dialogue on resilience
management with stakeholders, such as
industry associations and policymakers, is
essential for the timely and broad acceptance
of resilience concepts. ❒
Igor Linkov
1
*, Todd Bridges
2
, Felix Creutzig
3
,
Jennifer Decker
4
, Cate Fox-Lent
1
, Wolfgang Kröger
5
,
James H. Lambert
6
, Anders Levermann
7
,
Benoit Montreuil
8
, Jatin Nathwani
9
,
Raymond Nyer
10
, Ortwin Renn
11
, Benjamin Scharte
12
,
Alexander Scheler
13
, Miranda Schreurs
14
and
homas hiel-Clemen
15
are at
1
United States Army
Corps of Engineers — Engineer Research and
Development Center, Environmental Laboratory,
696 Virginia Road, Concord, Massachusetts 01742,
USA,
2
United States Army Corps of Engineers —
Engineer Research and Development Center,
Environmental Laboratory, 3909 Halls Ferry Road,
Vicksburg, Massachusetts 39180, USA,
3
Mercator
Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate
Change, Torgauer Straβe 12–15, 10829 Berlin,
Germany,
4
Embassy of Canada, Leipziger Platz 17,
10117 Berlin, Germany,
5
Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology Zürich (ETH), Scheuchzerstrasse 7,
8092 Zürich, Switzerland,
6
University of Virginia,
151 Engineer’s Way, Charlottesville, Virginia
22903, USA,
7
Potsdam Institute for Climate
Impact Research, Telegrafenberg A 31, 14191
Potsdam, Germany,
8
Université Laval, 2325 Rue de
l’Université, Québec G1V 0A6, Canada,
9
University
of Waterloo, 200 University Ave W, Waterloo,
Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada,
10
RNC Conseil and
Ecole Centrale de Paris, 56 Rue Charles Laitte,
92200 Neuilly-sur-Seine, France,
11
University
of Stuttgart, Seidenstraβe 36, 70174 Stuttgart,
Germany,
12
Fraunhofer Institute for High-Speed
Dynamics, Eckerstraβe 4, 79104 Freiburg, Germany,
13
Hamburg University of Technology, Kasernenstraβe
12, 21073 Hamburg, Germany,
14
Free University
of Berlin, Ihnestraβe 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany,
15
Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Lohbrügger
Kirchstrasse 65, 21033 Hamburg, Germany.
*
e-mail: igor.linkov@usace.army.mil
References
1. IPCC Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to
Advance Climate Change Adaptation. A Special Report of Working
Groups I and II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
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2. Levermann, A. Nature 506, 27–29 (2014).
3. Linkov, I. et al. Env. Sci. Tech. 47, 10108–10110 (2014).
4. National Research Council Disaster Resilience: A National
Imperative (he National Academies Press, 2012).
5. Park, J., Seager, T. P., Rao, P. C. S., Convertino, M. & Linkov, I.
Risk Analysis 33, 356–367 (2013).
6. Linkov, I. et al. Environ. Syst. Decisions 33, 471–476 (2013).
7. Roege, P. et al. Energy Policy (in the press).
8. Dauphiné, A. & Provitolo. D. Annales de Géographie
654, 115–125 (2007).
9. Lambert, J. H., Tsang, J. & hekdi, S. Am. Soc. Civ. Eng. J. Infrastr. Syst.
19, 384–394 (2013).
10. Bridges, T. et al. Coastal risk reduction and resilience
(US Army Corps of Engineers, 2013).
11. Hollnagel, E. & Fujita, Y. Nuc. Eng. Tech. 45, 1–8 (2013).
12. World Commission on Environment and Development
Our common future (Oxford Univ. Press, 1987).
Acknowledgements
his paper resulted from discussions at a workshop on the use
of risk and resilience assessment methodologies in guiding
policy development, held at the Embassy of Canada in Berlin,
Germany on 4 February 2014. Partial inancial support for the
workshop was provided by grant W911NF-13-1-0168 to RNC
Conseil, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Additional funding was
provided by the German National Academy of Technology
and Engineering (Acatech), the Helmholtz Association,
the Embassy of Canada and the Society for Risk Analysis.
Permission was granted by the USACE Chief of Engineers to
publish this material. he views and opinions expressed in
this paper are those of the individual authors and not those of
the US Army or other sponsor organizations.
COMMENTARY:
Capturing provenance of global
change information
Xiaogang Ma, Peter Fox, Curt Tilmes, Katharine Jacobs and Anne Waple
Global change information demands access to data sources and well-documented provenance to
provide the evidence needed to build conidence in scientiic conclusions and decision making.
A new generation of web technology, the Semantic Web, provides tools for that purpose.
T
he topic of global change covers
changes in the global environment
that may alter the capacity of the
Earth to sustain life and support human
systems
1
. his includes changes to climate,
land productivity, oceans or other water
resources, atmospheric composition and/or
chemistry and ecological systems. Data
and indings associated with global change
research are of great public, government
and academic concern and are used
in policy and decision making, which
makes the provenance of global change
information especially important. In
addition, because diferent types of decisions
beneit from diferent types of information,
understanding how to capture and present
the provenance of global change information
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